As described more fully in the “Background and Description of Related Art” sections of the aforementioned formal and provisional applications, to which the reader is referred for a more fulsome discussion, the advent and stunning growth in popularity of “smart” mobile phones, mobile tablet computers and similar devices has led in turn to the development of hundreds of thousands of “apps,” shorthand for software applications, that users may have preinstalled on their mobile devices or which users may selectively download to their devices from an internet “store” or other remote location. In conjunction with a cloud based server and associated cloud based software, such apps perform highly targeted, specific tasks beneficial to the user.
This mobile technology has, among other things, offered users the opportunity to conduct myriad business and personal activities (including those involving high levels of interaction with other individuals, groups, website based communities and businesses) in a timely fashion while “on the go.” The combination of mobile phones, mobile tablet computers and the like with apps and cloud computing centers has created a highly customizable platform that has led to a burst of innovation, but much remains to be done to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by these technologies.
With cloud computing, selectively sharing of information with any number of third-parties has become more convenient and more prevalent, the well-known Google docs and Google sites applications being familiar examples of ways of creating, storing and selectively sharing a wide range of information with others. There are many other familiar examples of the creating and sharing of information via the internet including the so-called “social applications,” such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, Google+, website-based communities, messaging apps, such as iMessage by Apple, WhatsApp, now owned by Facebook, and various email services, e.g., GMail, that enable users to connect to business counterparts, their “friends” and others to share and exchange information or data with them.
The myriad of existing mobile applications, including those cloud-based applications now popularly known for embodying “social, mobile and local” capabilities, have created a cacophony of separate, sometimes complementary, but most often overlapping and/or competing applications. These applications have varying “features” and deficiencies, such that users often find themselves jumping from app to app to access features they seek, confronting different, and often inconvenient (and/or confusing) user interfaces for accessing the various app features, and encountering the differing privacy standards imposed by the app owner.
The forms of business and social communication in wide use today, such as the many email apps and the many texting/messaging apps, as well as the many social media apps that allow individuals and groups to form and interconnect, have serious shortcomings. For example, email is based on an outmoded post office paradigm where communications are formally addressed with a date, to, from, cc, bcc, subject line and signature line which often includes as well the business name, business title, address, phone, fax, mobile phone and other contact information of the sender, all part of message “overhead” displayed along with the substantive content of the message. Attachments are electronically appended to or “enclosed” with the message like enclosures to a letter.
Messages thus composed are “sent” as individual and inseparable packets to each of the named recipients, like letters deposited with the post office. The above-described email “overhead” often occupies more screen space than the substance of the communication, which is particularly problematic for users of relatively small screen mobile phones. In all events, such message overhead pointlessly distracts the recipients' attention from the substance of the message, a form of cognitive tax not offset by any significant substantive benefit.
With email, it is particularly burdensome and annoying when it is necessary to read in context a string of emails, each incorporating the same repetitive message overhead. Moreover, finding and accessing one or more attachments of interest in long strings of past emails with many attachments is exceptionally time consuming and inconvenient, prompting many users to download email attachments to their computers or mobile devices for filing in electronic folders on such devices or, alternatively, to upload the attachments to cloud based storage systems, such Google Drive or its equivalent, for filing there in electronic folders created by the user. These organizational burdens, which are similar to dealing with physical documents and files in paper form, are distracting and time consuming.
Continuing to use GMail as representative, emails only “go away” if they are archived, deleted or otherwise affirmatively acted upon by the user in a manner similar to one's handling of letters, documents and the like placed in a physical inbox. Many users neglect to perform these affirmative actions with the result that hundreds if not thousands of emails accumulate in the user's inbox. Alternatively, to clear their inboxes, more organized users may perform many, perhaps a hundred or more archiving and/or deleting steps per day, another nuisance “job” and distracting cognitive tax.
Archived emails in GMail are placed in a “haystack” filing system, to be found by initiating a search, another burdensome “job,” or by opening folders where the attachments were previously filed or by relying on electronic criteria for sorting incoming emails into various categories, with varying, but usually unsatisfying, levels of accuracy and refinement. Serious email users are all too familiar with these and the many other shortcomings of email. Another burdensome problem with email is that information does not come to users in organized form by subject matter; rather it arrives chronologically and is presented to the user in that form, or perhaps crudely sorted into a few general categories, such as GMail currently offers. GMail also presents a sequence of emails between individuals as “strings,” but this often is more aggravating than helpful. Searching a “haystack,” the Google approach to organization, presents the user with an unwanted “job;” it is far preferable to have communications organized from the outset thereby enabling the user to easily view and deal with matters by subject matter, rather than by the order in which they are chronologically received.
Texting and messaging apps obviate the formality, and aspects of the associated complexity, of email as above described, but still transmit information in indivisible packets, like physical letters, and tend to be useful only for simple, in the moment communications and in the moment sharing of photos or the like. The younger demographic in particular abhors email while business people cling to email for business, but often use texting for personal matters. The simplicity and informality of texting/messaging is both its advantage and its shortcoming as demonstrated by the fact that this form of communication has not found currency as a substitute for email.
Texting/messaging apps and email all typically require that every user maintain his or her own “contact” list to provide a basis for communicating with others. This usually involves the annoying and time consuming task of exchanging “contact” information and placing such information in one's own contact list. Contact information often changes over time requiring that one way or another a person periodically “update” their contacts list. Apps such as iMessage now at least ease the updating process by noting a change in a certain aspects of a sender's contact information, but only when a message is received from that person, and asking if one wishes to accept the new information. Also, for one reason or another, one may wish to remove a person from their contacts list. Such tasks mimic the old rolodex files and the associated physical process of keeping track of one's “contacts.” Social apps such as Facebook and LinkedIn now allow users to place their profiles online which can be used as a basis for communicating with others, but those apps are in many ways unsatisfactory for many well-known reasons. As will be seen, “profiles” in the context of the invention are useful for far more than simply providing personal information about an individual. For example, as will be seen, profiles in the context of the invention may be used as repository of information about virtually anything. In an affinity group or other tracked object, there may be profiles of activities or subject areas, which may supplement or replace information traditionally made part of a website thereby to make such information more easily accessible to users, particularly mobile device users.
Users should not have to jump from one app to another (e.g., email to message app, and vice versa) for formal/informal communications and/or for other forms of social interaction. A single app that has the simplicity and ease of texting/messaging but satisfies the needs of more formal or fulsome communication, and as well the needs of wide ranging social interaction and information sharing, e.g., photos, videos and documents, in a largely self-organizing manner is highly desirable goal unmet by the prior art.
Beyond email and messaging, social interaction often originates with web based communities which use websites as a way of creating and binding people to their online communities. For example, businesses, professional associations and social groups of all kinds, profit and nonprofit, such as university alumni associations, charitable organizations and other non-profits, and the hundreds of thousands of other associations, have historically created websites with varying levels of depth and complexity as a means to enable users to engage with them online. Since visiting of websites, even if the user is sufficiently motivated to create and use “bookmarks,” is relatively inconvenient, businesses, associations and the like have come to send automated emails and texts, to any user who will accept them, as a means of maintaining the entity in the forefront of users' minds. Passively awaiting users to visit one's website is not a route to success for associations or businesses, nor a path for promoting effective social interaction with and among members in associations and other online communities.
Sizeable associations and other organizations not only maintain websites and send machine generated emails to their members, they also feel a necessity to have a presence on many of the popular social sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. The cost of maintaining a presence on such diverse platforms is not only high, but, worse, it sends association members to platforms that are controlled by businesses that favor their own best interests, not those of the association or other organization. Further, it disperses association members among many social sites, rather than keeping them in a common meeting place. Experience demonstrates that such association and business social sites often are wastelands, even for large associations, and provide at significant cost only modest, if any, benefit to relatively small portions of the organization membership.
Large organizations often spend millions of dollars building and maintaining their websites. For small, local businesses and other organizations, website creation, updating and maintenance is relatively (or prohibitively) expensive and difficult, often requiring expensive professional assistance. It is also relatively difficult and expensive for such small businesses, charitable organizations and tens of thousands of associations and the like to generate fresh emails or texts on a daily or weekly basis and, even if they are able to do so, users are naturally reluctant to accept emails from all but a handful of such entities least their inboxes become inundated with information in which they have only occasional interest. Small businesses and small organizations are distinctly disadvantaged in the online world.
Over the past decade an ever growing percentage of emails received by typical email users, from then perhaps thirty to forty percent to now often eighty to ninety percent, are machine generated, as opposed to being individually composed and sent by a human being. Most often such machine generated email is sent by an entity, such as member associations, nonprofit and charitable organizations, seeking the user's attention and/or money. This is not spam, but machine generated email recipients willingly opt to receive to facilitate interaction with the sender. A significant and growing percentage of texts are also auto generated. For example, it is estimated that about one-third of all Twitter “tweets” are generated electronically by machine bots and that the percentage of machine generated emails/texts are ever increasing. Researchers estimate that the expected continuing increase in such machine generated data, coupled with the impending “internet of things,” will result by 2020 in forty percent of all internet data being auto-generated by machine. Better ways are needed for enabling users to manage such voluminous, frequently sent, machine generated data so that it does not overwhelm the recipient, bury human communications, and become more of a burden than a help.
Email, text messages and the like, whether received from machines or humans, prompt profoundly stimulus-driven behaviors. Such stimuli are largely unpredictable as email/texts and the like are typically ordered by time received, not subject matter. The repetitive switching between disparate tasks in going from email to email imposes a substantial cognitive tax. It is exhausting, depleting of cognitive processing and costly for productivity. Creating and implementing automated techniques for attempting to sort incoming emails by subject matter is not reliable and imposes yet another burdensome task on the user, and the ordinary person is simply unwilling or unable to take on these tasks. There is a long felt need for new, more useful and less cognitively taxing paradigms for enabling humans to cope with the enormity and diversity of mobile, social, local and, indeed, all forms of worldwide online human and machine generated communications that have come to dominate our lives.